#273 The Sign of the Potent Pills- Dashiell Hammett

#273 The Sign of the Potent Pills- Dashiell Hammett

This reads more like a British parlor game of who-dun-it rather than the hard-boiled detective stories Hammett is known for, but it is an entertaining one. Mr. Trate is a young detective summoned to a house full of awaiting people. He does not know why is has been asked there and neither do we. As he stands in the room listening to its inhabitants talk vaguely talk about what has happened, he is occasionally brought into the mix. His 11 day career causes him to be poked at relentlessly:

-“Go ahead young fellow…detect something for the lady.”

-“I hope you ain’t going to be too hard on us young fellow.”

-“I’m gonna smack that punk yet.”

Intrigue, fires, gun-play, and a bit of a twist ending (although a convoluted one), makes for a fun read. The piece did suffer a bit of an identity crisis. What turned out as more of a farce, at first had a bit of a spooky mood, with descriptions like:

-“In front of the house a high grilled gate interrupted the black fence. It was a gate designed for shutting people out rather than admitting, a gate wrought in lines as uninviting as the upright sharp pickets.”

-“Opaque blinds and heavy curtains hid the windows. A glittering chandelier lighted the room. From the farther end a dozen faces looked at Trate with indefinite expectancy.”

Notable Passage: “I think it’s wonderful…to be able to make plans that go through successfully no matter how much everybody tries to spoil them from the beginning.”

Rating: 7-7-7-6 Total=27

#252 The Hunter- Dashiell Hammett

#252 The Hunter- Dashiell Hammett

Hammett, of course, is the author of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man. This collection is a compendium of his previously uncollected short works.  Most of them are not the crime stories that he became famous for. The Hunter however, is such a work, it’s a detective mystery, of the hard-boiled variety—I’ve never been sure exactly what hard-boiled meant in a detective story, but here you have it.

According to the introduction, Fred Vitt is particularly hard-boiled and is on the case of a check forger and narrows it down to a business owner or his bookkeeper. He settles on the book keeper, but gets stonewalled: “That was better. Againts antagonism he could make progress.”

He puts on the hard press and gets his confession. Another good day’s work. The life of a private detective can be a hard, thankless life.

“But he liked its irregular variety, the assurances of his own cleverness that come frequently to any but the most uniformly successless of detectives, and the occasional full-tilt chase after a fleeting someone who was…a scoundrel of one sort or another. Too, a detective has a certain prestige in some social divisions, a matter in no way equalized by his lack of any standing at all in others.”

Rating: 7-7-6-7 Total= 27